Hello Brotherhood,

today i was burning some backups onto DVD. That lazy bum in me wanted to print out the Finder-Window of the DVD just like the legacy offers it and then stick this printout into the jewelcase. I found out that it's impossible to print the content of a finder-window, yeah, there actually IS a "Print"-Command in the menu, but it seems to be doing something else (it opens the selected file in its native app and starts the "print"-command there).

OK, then...

Well, at least copying the text from the filelist works. BUT It only copies the Filenames, no size, date, etc...
End of Story, i copy the filelist-text and paste it into my Indesign-based layout, which is basically a textbox on a 12x12cm Page...

I DO know there are gazillion of catalog apps which may do it better, but Finder can't print the content of filelist-window? wtf?

Yeah, that really does suck. I would think the cheap (but not necessarily easy) solution would be to to combine taking a screen shot with some macros and/or AppleScript to crop (and/or resize) the image and print it.

Yes, this is possible. Sorry, but i deeply hate this "solution" for various reasons. Screenshot means the list is limited in size by the height of your screen-res. And we have 2007.
Longer list -> more (completely wack) problems. I won't do crappy workarounds and do multiple screengrabs.
Second, taking a screenshot results in wacko screen-fonts, which then printed look awful. I simply refuse to print out badly rendered screenfonts. Argh, argh. I got some discs with printouts this way from friends who doesn't know about the shittyness of OS X.
When i couldn't resist and told them about this lousyness they simply didn't understand.

The socalled "most advanced OS" is friggin lousy, the simplest stuff isn't possible.
When the legacy printed the content of a window, it was using the font you were using in the finder, but in the printers native res. OS X is limited to screengrabs. Wow! (Oh, and the legacy wasn't perfect there, but miles ahead of OS X)

Brother BN, please note my anger is not against your help with this solution. It's against this POS of an OS.

I gotta buy some beer now.

Smithz this is one of the hard headed problems with Mac OS X. The programmers have left you in state of reaching for a beer.

I found this Screenshot Utility. I have not used it. The standard version is freeware. The advanced shareware(pay us) version naturally has CD and DVD printing.

You get no argument from me why this is left out of the Finder is the fault of the programmers.

Yes, this is possible. Sorry, but i deeply hate this "solution" for various reasons.

Well, yeah, it is a crappy solution because many directories are not going to fit on the screen as you said.

Brother BN, please note my anger is not against your help with this solution. It's against this POS of an OS.

Oh yeah. Been there, done that. If I had a dog lying around while I worked in OS X, it would be covered in bruises from being kicked so often.

I found this Screenshot Utility.

At first glance, Rico, that looks like a damn good solution.

Hey Rico, thanks! Great find.
This little thing is exactly what i need. A little more flexible than the legacy solution, too. Sweet, thanks to the 3rd party coders.

For free it seems to get the job done nicely.

Setting the preferences comes at the end just before printing there is a check box for set as default. You can include thumbnails. Print CD or DVD Box covers. The covers are meant to print landscape.

kudos to the coders. PrintWindow is the right amount of simple. They fall into the 11% category for working outside the box.

I just thought of a trivial task question for the Beta CS3 Bridge. Since Adobe introduced the Bridge they have change the way you rate, sort and view images in folders. The first Bridge/Browser had a very simple flag and rate system. Flagging images was quick. You could easily set a folder to view only flagged images nice.

Fast forward Bridge CS3 Adobe has long since abandoned the simplicity of Flags replacing this with a star rating system. For the life of me I can not figure out how to view images once you give them say a 2 star rating. I can not find anywhere in Bridge to show me only the 2 star rated images for a given folder. You can sort by rating but it only reorders all the images by stars. It has to be some where this simple function. The Adobe programmers seem to have buried it deep under to many layers if it is there.

As usual they give with one hand what they take with the other.

PrintWindow has been around for a while, since our MFI days... and it has been a mess. Used to crash like sick when you'd try to print windows with a lot of files. I have been waiting for version 4.0.

I don't know how many times I wrote in Apple feedback that the simple acto of printing the finder window was something print designers did all the time when sending people disks... it was almost like a courtesy

Well, you really have to hand it to those shareware authors who smooth over the rough edges of these supposed ready-for-prime-time commercial OS releases. They are often the most creative of all software designers.

It's a seemingly trivial task to grab the resize widget on the bottom right of a window in order to resize it. But I find myself constantly overshooting and instead of clicking on and grabbing the resize widget, clicking on a window underneath. I think those shadows give the impression that the active widget-grabbing area is lower than it actually is. And it also gives the impression that it is smaller than it actully is. I note that I can also grab the area above the three lines. But I usually don't because it's not intutive to do so. You just naturall head right for those three lines at the very corner of the window as the area to click on. OS 9's Platinum has a much better design. They're much easier and more intuitive.

It's still rather shocking to me at times just how devolved and backward the OS X interface is.

I have always said, God, I MISS so much more when mousing with OS X. Well, guess what? It's not always you. OS X's window manager sometimes screws up and thinks the scrollbars are the drop shadow. The size of the window, somewhere in OS X's brain, sometimes forgets to include the scrollbars.

It also forgets to include the bottom items in the left Finder column. I'll try to drag crap onto them, and it won't register that I'm trying to drag and drop. But if I resize the Window larger, forcing the Window Manager to update what size that Finder Window REALLY is, the drag and drop works again.

These things are bugs, and yet Apple, and X-Men are glad when we blame ourselves. You're not going crazy, this is just crapware.

One day I may thank OS X for a career change because it is such a piece of shit to work with on a daily basis.

quote:

One day I may thank OS X for a career change because it is such a piece of shit to work with on a daily basis.

Amen. But there are people who hear me moan and groan and go "whaaaa?" Because OS X does what they need to do, just fine. OS X does have its strengths, and I do see them... for example, if I spent all day and night in my TEXT EDITOR, like many programmers do, this shit would be FINE. I have had the fewest problems with something like BBEdit. That seems like a program that takes the Unixy greppy texty codie world and actually plays on the strength of a more server-based operating system.

The problem is, it's gearhead shit. And to me, it's not ADVANCED application work, even though the work that guys DO on text editors is pro work. It may be advanced programming, but it doesn't require an advanced application to create it. Finding and replacing text is not that hard for ANY computer.

The analogy is, you could be writing the great american novel. Your creative work could be leaps and bounds ahead of what anybody does, you're a pro writer... but your TOOLS aren't required to be top of the line. You could basically use a pencil and legal pad, and write the same shit. A word processor is most of what you need, and so your computer doesn't have to be super advanced or modern for you to do your job.

Apparently, movie people and music people are thrilled with Macs now. Even pros. But it just so happens that what they do is more tightly aligned with the casual use aspects of Apple Computer's post OS X strategy. Because CASUAL music and home movies appeal to the digikid market, the OS and hardware is friendlier to people working in those fields.

What's still really lacking, though, is my field. The graphic design/print/web/multimedia development/fine art world. It seems like OS X is a constant struggle in these creative disciplines. I assume that it's because there's more to designing magazine ads or movie posters than just storing shit on a server and retrieving it. There's much more drawing/drafting/painting, retouching, type manipulation, color correcting, animating, and so forth. Lots of big creative apps have to work together, the files are fairly numerous, some are fairly large. And so far, OS X does not seem adequate to the task.

It handles small stuff. It starts getting flaky the more you do. It's reliable when you're a casual user, and gets progressively more UNreliable, the more you have to do.

I've said this a million times before, so I won't bother--oh what the hell--if I'm doing a business card design, I can usually rest easy. But a big retail web site? A 200 page full color print catalog? I have to factor in the "OS X is going to screw up" lag time, lost productivity into the equation. It almost forces me to take small, shit jobs, rather than bigger developments. It's almost like Apple's business being more iPods now than computers. They aren't concentrating on the bigger ticket stuff. And that makes the bigger ticket stuff tougher for me.

It's way past due to make the high end Macs and OS X pro capable for things like Adobe Creative Suite and the like. Seems like PCs are becoming more reliable for those apps, and that's topsy turvy from the old days, when Macs ruled the creative/design world. I need good tools, and I want those tools to be Macs.

We pay a price for multitasking, memory protection, etc. That price is clicking on stuff in Finder windows, attempting to drag them somewhere, only to be defeated time and again. OS X first has to be woken up. And I don't mean that my hard drive is sleeping. I don't have that option checked. I mean that OS X is like some snoozing Target employee who you first have to nudge with your elbow a couple times before asking "Where do I find your lawn furniture?" Mouse clicks are the equivalent of the elbow nudges. So I first click on a blank spot in a Finder window. That's my nudge in the ribs to the sleeping employee. And then I click on the file I want to drag somewhere. That usually works. But if I go right for the file I'm defeated time and again.

Or maybe this is just the price we pay for amateurish programming and a bloated interface. I don't really know. I only know that this shouldn't be happening at all.

In OS 9, everything is immediate. When you click, you select. There’s no central committee discussion about it. There’s no lag. In OS X everything is a thread within a thread. You have to wait your turn. It’s like being in a bread line. You have to negotiate, maybe even bribe the OS to give you what you want. Give it some more memory. More CPU power. Bigger hard drives. Anything to get you to the head of the line.

Clearly OS X is a Commie OS and OS 9 is a capitalist OS. And it shows.

quote:

Originally posted by BN:
We pay a price for multitasking, memory protection

Hm, may i say that we pay for that bloated approach of these features in OS X. Multitasking, memory protection and other well-known technologies are IMHO not the reason for that laggy crap that Apple still sells successfully to them sheep. It's Apples way of doing it.
I have to mention BeOS again, which also had these features but wasn't laggy BECAUSE the focus of development was a fresh start from scratch, an effective core and speed, speed, speed. (and all that on some 200mhz dinosaur)
OS X on the other hand has a very conservative approach (e.g. awful hybrid-kernel), not fish, not meat. GUI looks more important than speed, and worst that userbase-fanboyism which defends crap etc. etc.

Argh, i'm still addicted to beer.

Multitasking, memory protection and other well-known technologies are IMHO not the reason for that laggy crap that Apple still sells successfully to them sheep. It's Apples way of doing it.

I don't have laggy problems in Windows XP. But once in a while I have problems with some other problem hogging the CPU. Sometimes things just won't let go for a while. That's annoying. But most of the time the frontmost application in Windows feels like a good ol' OS 9 app. It's all yours. Nothing feels hamstrung.

So surely you're correct, smithz. It's possible to build a modern multitasking OS that doesn't feel like it's been dipped in molasses. Thalo and others (and probably yourself, of course) have given what I thought have been a number of plausible theories for why OS X is so laggy. But I admit I don't have a clue. I don't have the inside knowledge of what they've done wrong or what technologies are just fundamentally poor ones to begin with. But there is something endemic to OS X. There's a character or karma it has that just seems to want to go slow, forget clicks, and otherwise act a bit brain dead at times. If I didn't know better I would say there are trolls down in the works somewhere.

quote:

OS X on the other hand has a very conservative approach (e.g. awful hybrid-kernel)

Brother smithz did you come up with this idea before or after your addiction to beer? A hybrid-kernel sounds like the opposite to conservative.

Brother Nelson. I have two words of advice. These are the first two words are ever spoke to an X-Critic audience.

Those words are "Think Different".

Brother Nelson. I have two words of advice. These are the first two words are ever spoke to an X-Critic audience.

Those words are "Think Different".

I wish a slogan was the answer to the problem, Rico. Or maybe it is. I think thalo knows an apt one.

Better interface. Control of fonts and anti-aliasing system-wide. Fix the lags. That's not asking much.